I want to test my RESTful applications directly via HTTP and I am looking for tools that can help me with that task. Basically I am looking for an easy wrapper for HTTP requests that can submit e.g. HTML forms or serialized resources as JSON or XML.
It would be great if there is a way to verify if the service is actually following REST architectural guidelines (statelessness, URIs, content negotiation etc.), too.
Being able to use it with JUnit would be a convenient bonus. Do you know about any libraries that could help me with what I want to do (and that are a little more than just a simple http client)?